Learning on your doorstep: Stimulating writing through creative play outdoors for ages 5-9

Isabel Hopwood-Stephens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415536820
• eBook ISBN: 9781136277634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As the Forest School movement gains popularity among UK educators, teachers are increasingly recognising the benefits of creative outdoor play. But how can busy primary school teachers fit regular, high quality outdoor learning into an already crowded timetable? How can they plan a range of rich, imaginative and creative experiences that build up into full topics? And how can they translate the excitement and engagement that they find out doors into increased enthusiasm and attainment indoors?

Learning on Your Doorstep integrates creative outdoor play with curricular attainment, while increasing the challenge, enjoyment and professional development of the teachers using it. The book presents a series of topics which channel the children's outdoor experience into writing outcomes to reflect the current Primary Framework for Literacy. Using child-led, kinaesthetic teaching and learning techniques, each topic helps teacher and class build an imaginary world to explore and includes:

• Session plan tables to enable teachers to easily access relevant information;
• collaborative activities, games and drama to stimulate discussion;
• photo-copiable items such as letters, imaginary maps and animal fact jigsaws;
• optional classroom follow-up activities and a final writing task;
• tips on how to prepare and resource each session.

Guidance on adapting for different abilities and ages is also given, along with curriculum links and pedagogical rationale, to let primary teachers put creative outdoor play at the centre of the primary teaching timetable.

The ideas in this book are suitable for implementation in any school environment, using resources commonly found in the stock cupboard or home. All you will need to add is some preparation and imagination!

1
Why use the outdoors for writing?

Introduction

Welcome to this book! I hope that it provides the inspiration and guidance that you are looking for. As teachers, we can positively influence the outlook and achievements of hundreds of children. We can create safe, supportive and creative environments where learning is a voyage of discovery and enrichment. And we can introduce children to the magic of the written word, a journey that starts with sharing a favourite story and ends with fabulous worlds flowing from the tip of a pen as we create our own …

Except that, for some children, it’s nothing like that. Writing is a halting and unrewarding process that exposes them as incompetent. Some children come to school with a seemingly innate understanding of how to write, but what can we do to help those who don’t?

This book aims to explain how we can help all children to write by taking them outside to learn. It argues that putting children in an open-ended, problem-solving situation stimulates deeper concentration and learning, benefits kinaesthetic learners and gives them first-hand experience to draw upon when producing their writing. And it seeks to demonstrate that this can be done in a typical school setting with nothing more than some planning, the contents of an average resources cupboard and a dash of imagination.

The benefits of learning outdoors

So why choose the outdoors as a setting for learning when we have perfectly well-heated and well-lit classrooms? The short answer is: because they love it. The longer answer takes in a slew of research into health, cognitive and social benefits, the main points of which are summarised below.

Health

Children love to run, shout, climb, explore and hide. This isn’t always possible in a classroom, but it is outdoors. The more time children spend outdoors, the more they engage in physical activity (Mygind, 2007), and research has shown that children who spend regular time outdoors are calmer in the classroom afterwards (Forestry Commission for Scotland, 2005). They also take less time off for illness, are better able to concentrate on their work and have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol (Grahn et al., 1997). You have probably also noticed that children don’t have as much freedom to roam as we used to, perhaps because of parental fears about traffic accidents or strangers. Most adults have fond, magical childhood memories of being in the woods and having the freedom to explore and experiment (O’Brien, 2004). Providing the children in your care with regular sessions outside, during which they can explore and interact with nature, is good for them – and you.

Psychological

Behaviours that seem anti-social in a confined space filled with twenty-nine other people are perfectly acceptable outside. Being in the open air gives you a chance to shout, run, leap, throw things, dig holes, build things, hide, or fall into a quiet contemplation of listening and watching. In short: freedom. This is particularly appealing to children who find themselves regularly infringing rules within the school building. The corner of the school field or a woodland area offers the additional comforts to children of being private (no strangers or dogs) and safe (no chance of getting lost, or having to keep an eye out for cars and bikes). Offering children high-quality, regular contact with the outdoors gives them a chance to forge their own relationship with it, which in the longer term will positively affect how they share it with their offspring (O’Brien, 2004).

Cognitive

A wealth of research has been conducted in this area, which can be summarised as follows. Children who are engaged in meaningful, child-led and supported activities outdoors tend to be more relaxed and engaged, leading to a wider awareness of their surroundings and deeper processing of the learning experience (Carver, 2003; Rickinson et al., 2004). This in turn leads to improved memory and recall of those experiences. They are also engaged in multi-sensory learning, which I explain further below.

Support for key learning theories

Some of the most ground-breaking theories about how children learn come to life before your eyes when teaching and learning outdoors. I have summarised how three of them work below, with specific reference to outdoor learning.

Experiential learning

In essence, experiential learning is learning by doing (Dewey, 1938). By way of an example, imagine that your class is studying settings in Literacy. Your class will be using a house in the woods as the setting for a story later in the week, so you want to prepare them with ideas for description. You read them Stickman by Julia Donaldson. Your class could look at the pictures together in the book and discuss what Stickman’s house is built from; or you could take your class outside to try to build their own houses for Stickman, from whatever they can find. Which of these learning experiences is the most powerful?

With the first scenario, the usual children who have auditory–visual learning styles will thrive on the discussion, but those with physical–kinaesthetic learning styles will be isolated, and will day-dream or disrupt their peers. With the second scenario, all the children will share a multi-sensory experience of collecting and snapping branches, digging in the soil with a twig, or heaving a heavy stone across the ground. Without realising that they’re doing it, they will be collaborating and verbalising their thoughts, advising and supporting each other; this is particularly important for the kinaesthetic learners who feel that they cannot share their expertise in the classroom. And afterwards, they can speak from a position of expertise about how they built their shelter, what features it has, and even relate their experience of building it to the possible experiences of the story character. Such is the power of experiential learning.

Multiple intelligences

I have already touched upon the visual–auditory–kinaesthetic (VAK) model of learning and the problems encountered by kinaesthetic learners in a classroom environment. As children move up through Key Stage 1 into Key Stage 2, the learning styles best served by standard classroom activities tend to be visual or auditory, serving children who find it relatively easy to listen, follow instructions and imitate. So far, so disadvantageous for the kinaesthetic learner.

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1993) takes VAK learning styles a step further, arguing that in fact we all possess eight different intelligences:

• bodily–kinaesthetic
• linguistic
• musical
• spatial
• naturalist
• logical–mathematical
• intrapersonal
• interpersonal.

He contends that some are innate to us and relate to areas where we excel, and some do not come so naturally but can be developed with support. Gardner argues that we should seek to recognise and enrich all of these intelligences, rather than using assessment and grading techniques that favour linguistic and logical–mathematical intelligences to the detriment of valuing and developing the others. Reflecting on a list of typical classroom activities in Key Stage 1 and lower Key Stage 2 – completing a worksheet, watching a video clip, listening to a story, group discussion, creating a mind-map, writing notes on whiteboards – it is quite shocking when we see the narrow range of intelligences catered for by them.

Now compare this to building a den for Stickman’s family outside. The only intelligence not explicitly catered for by this activity is musical, although finding and creating sounds and musical instruments outside is a topic in its own right. There are clear organisational and assessment advantages to whole-class activities based on writing and recording, but we must not neglect the wider, richer learning experience which should feed into these.

Kinaesthetic learning

Kinaesthetic learners – those who learn by making, building, manipulating, dismantling or just fiddling – benefit hugely from activities where they have the opportunity to explore and learn at first hand. It is not always possible to accommodate this in the classroom, and neither should we seek to replace all activities which kinaesthetic learners find hard; they will still need to develop their mastery of writing and it would be a dereliction of duty to prevent them from doing so. Rather, we should be increasing the amount and quality of kinaesthetic learning experiences that they participate in, as a way of increasing their engagement and sense of expertise in the topic before asking them to write about it at length. Or, in other words, giving them a good run-up before asking them to jump the bar.

What effective outdoor learning looks like

Some of you, with fresh memories of peeling little Johnny off the fence during a previous foray into ‘outdoor learning’, might be reading this with a raised eyebrow. And it’s true that you won’t automatically enhance and enrich the learning experience by simply going outside for a while (Rickinson et al., 2004). So what does an effective outdoor learning session look like?

Green space

This can be the hedges and grass in the corner of the school field, a strip of grass and shrubs behind a classroom block, or a wild area that you have planted. But most importantly, it’s not the playground or the classroom. The children are able to explore and interact with the natural environment and are actively encouraged to do so.

Problem solving

Investigating a problem, where there is no fixed answer or fixed way of finding a solution, puts the children in charge of their learning and encourages them to explore their own ideas rather than worry about whether they’re getting it right. Instead of passive learning, effective outdoor learning actively engages the children in looking for a solution to a problem.

Creative

Anna Craft, a leading thinker on creative learning for children, defines creativity as using a combination of imagination, intelligence, self-creation and self-expression (Craft, 2001). Put bluntly, an effective outdoor learning session should encourage these attributes in spades. The children will be invited to develop their own ideas and test out their own theories, rather than the teacher modelling something and then asking them to copy it.

Collaborative

Activities are designed to encourage team-work, pair-work and collaboration. This creates a supportive atmosphere for those easily discouraged, encourages a deeper learning experience through sustained collaborative thinking (Waller, 2007) and lets children learn socially – by talking, sharing ideas and articulating their thoughts. Teachers restrict the amount of children’s speech within the classroom for understandable reasons, but we should not forget how essential it is to children’s active construction of their understanding of the world (Vygotsky, 1978) and should provide meaningful, collaborative opportunities to enhance their learning.

Reflective

An effective outdoor learning experience gives the children a chance to reflect on what they have done, be it through taking their peers on a ‘tour’ around what they have built, or talking with their partner about what they learned today. Reflecting on what we have achieved or learned, through adversity as well as triumph, is a key learning skill that makes us more resilient and effective learners (Claxton, 2002).

Social

As already discussed, children learn by actively constructing their knowledge from interactions with their surroundings and each other. The value of talk for learning is enshrined in the Speaking and Listening objectives within the Primary Literacy Strategy (Department for Education and Skills, 2006) and the use of talk partners or learning buddies to help children absorb and articulate what they are learning. Why should this be any different outside? An effective outdoor learning session is full of children learning through social interaction: yelling across the activity area, crouched and whispering, giving instructions, listening intently, reading non-verbal cues, offering encouragement, asking questions or expressing opinions.

Tailored

We all know the pitfalls of setting a task that is too complex. The same applies here. The activities in an effective outdoor learning experience need to be accessible to all while being sufficiently open ended to provide a challenge for kinaesthetic–spatial learners.

These are the ingredients of a good outdoor learning experience, and this recipe is used for all the learning topics in the book.

So how does this all link to writing?

Researchers into writing development agree that it is a complex process, requiring a child who is writing a story to move between planning, monitoring, production and revision (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987), often several times and in no specific order, while composing one piece. This can make writing a disjointed process, full of stops and starts, for a child who has yet to master it. A child’s willingness to pick up a pencil can also be affected by their internal view of their capability and expertise as a writer, the extent of their cognitive development, their motivation for the task and the educational context within which it takes place (Scheuer et al., 2006). In other words, a child’s belief about their ability and suitability to the task can affect their output as much as their mechanical skills:

Low confidence or self-esteem is one of the most controlling elements of a child’s ability to learn and behave appropriately, and thus achieve his/her own potential.

(Margerison, 1996, p. 176)

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why use the outdoors for writing?
• 2 Getting ready
• 3 How to use the writing topics
• 4 Topic 1:The enchanted forest
• 5 Topic 2: Forest club
• 6 Topic 3: Island quest
• 7 Topic 4: Forest detectives
• 8 Topic 5: Celtic life
• 9 Topic 6:Animal world
• 10 How do I …?
• Appendices
• References